COURAGE

savienojot kolekcijas

The collection contains material about Sergei Soldatov, one of Estonia's most notable dissidents, who was culturally most active when living in exile after 1981. There are different types of documents and photographs in the collection, which describe not only Soldatov's life, but also the activities of dissident movements in the Soviet Union. Soldatov also used this material in his numerous books, which he published himself.

Part of a civic and ethical project with no equivalent in any of the other former communist countries of Europe, the Museum collection of the Sighet Memorial is an extraordinary site of memory, both individual and collective, of Romanian communism seen from the perspective of the victims of the regime. The Museum collection of the Memorial to the Victims of Communism and to the Resistance includes an impressive number of documents, photographs, letters, newspaper collections, books, manuscripts, albums, and various other objects illustrating both the repressive dimension of the communist regime in Romania and the reaction of Romanian society to that regime, in accordance with the vision promoted by the Civic Academy Foundation through the intermediary of the International Centre for Studies into Communism. 

The Oral History Collection of the Sighet Memorial contains several thousand testimonies of great relevance for what the Romanian communist regime meant in general and especially for the prison experience of thousands of former political detainees. The distinctiveness of this oral history collection is strictly connected to the recovery and systematic conservation of the memory of those who went through significant traumatic experiences during the communist regime, with the aim of saving from oblivion that part of history which was officially suppressed until 1989, but which emerged spontaneously to the surface immediately after the change of regime.

The “Sixtiers Museum” Collection is located in a small museum in Kyiv, Ukraine in a building belonging to the Ukrainian political party Rukh. Nadia Svitlychna and Mykola Plakhotniuk founded this museum as way of honouring and documenting the struggles of a cohort of Soviet Ukrainian dissidents during the 1960s-1980s. Included in the permanent exhibition are paintings, graphics, sculptures, embroidery and other artworks produced by artists affiliated with the sixtiers movement. The museum also displays the poems, letters and literary works of the writers in their midst, as well as their typewriters, handcrafted items made while in the GULag, or clothes worn while living in exile, like Svitlychna’s own camp uniform. Also figuring prominently are posters for events and exhibitions organized by this group. The guided tour is a moving, concise rendition of their struggle, aimed at the museum’s target audiences, young students, scholars, and the general public.

These materials depict the lives of a dynamic group of Soviet Ukrainians engaged in a principled creative and ideological struggle with the Soviet regime in the 1960s and 1970s. They were poets, artists, graphic designers, historians, doctors, and even a Soviet army official, all of whom became deeply involved in human rights activism under late socialism. Many were members of large Soviet institutions—like the Ukrainian writers and artist unions, the Literary Institute in Kyiv, the Soviet armed forces. The Soviet government’s ideological retrenchment after Khrushchev transformed these dissidents, who had worked hard to try and reform the system and make it more humane, into individuals in open conflict with the authorities.